A handful of blue (vuoden 2003 painos)

There is nothing on the cover of this book or blurb to let you know that this book is about a whale stranding, and I like books that don't give too much away on the ouset, so i was pleasantly surprised. Jeremy 's family have invested everything they own into a remote farm directly on a beach only to have 2 years of drought see them on the verge of bankruptcy. To make things worse, in the space of one week, Jeremy manages to get sprung looking a naked lady who is staying in their guest cottage, send his sister's pet sheep Herman to the slaughterhouse, and , while practising fishing knots with his best mate Eddie, forget to untie the trailer so it crashed straight through the back of their station wagon. To make matters even worse, he leaves a tap running in their house, and their tank runs dry!
The only problem he doesn't cause himself, is the cyclone that threatens their beach - but in the middle of the night, his dog wakes him and he discovers 53 pilot whales have washed on shore! Can the locals and wildlife experts re-float them before the worst of the storm hits, or will this story have a sad ending for the whales and a (sort of ) happy one for Jeremy's family? Different, sometimes funny, sometimes sad novel which was unpredictable.